All posts tagged ‘punishment’

First, don’t spank. Corporal punishment makes depressed kids who act out. But if you insist on whacking your children to teach them things like kindness, please avoid being an otherwise good parent. A study published Monday in the journal Child and Adolescent Mental Healthshows that among parents who spank, it’s the ones with positive communication that predict depressive symptoms in their kids. If the spanking parent is across-the-board harsh and uncommunicative — meh, the kid’s firewalled against it.

The study, performed at the University of Tennessee by Amber Wimsatt, Paula Fite, Stevie Grassett, and Jamie Rathert posits that it’s the lack of consistency of a parent who is both the source of stress and of comfort that especially throws kids for a loop.

The finding comes from 89 kids, aged 9-12, and three measures — one of corporal punishment, one of positive parent-child communication, and one of childhood depression (overall 14 percent of kids met criteria for being “at risk” for depression). The first findings are pretty much what you’d expect: parents who spank have a higher rate of depressed kids, and parents who have poor parent-child communication have depressed kids. Continue Reading “If You Spank, Don’t Console” »

The de facto punishment when I was a kid was a spanking, but for severe infractions, where that wasn’t enough, a week of being grounded or weekend of hard labor often followed.

With my own kids we’ve gravitated toward grounding as the effective punishment of choice. Not always the full grounded, can’t go anywhere, do anything, kind of my childhood, but a restriction of the privileges. Especially the privileges that are most valued like the cell phone, laptop, Nintendo DS and web access.

Our geeklets attend school online during the day, so a complete ban on internet access isn’t possible, but thanks to its access restrictions settings, our router comes to the rescue. As of this week, one of the laptops in the house can only access the internet from 8am to 8pm. We’ve been honest about the hourly restrictions, but haven’t yet fessed up to why a certain website fails to load from our house. Maybe I’ll just blame it on karma: “The internet knows when you’ve been bad and punishes you accordingly.”

For those interested, I’m using an aging, but reliable, Linksys WRT54G Router with the Tomato Firmware. There are about half a dozen open source alternatives to the Linksys firmware, and a few of them have useful access restriction settings.

In this case the punishment is for surfing foopets and youtube after being told to go to bed. How would you handle this form of misbehavior?